Islamic piety as sovereign transcendence in the Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan

Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of a transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, insist that only their own form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) is capable of spreading Islamic virtue. Tablighis dismiss the efforts to spread Islam by a diverse array of Islamist actors, including political parties, corporations, NGOs, and popular televangelists. This highlights a central cleavage within the Islamic revival in Pakistan. While Islamists have adopted a modernist conception of religion associated with egalitarian individualism, Tablighis understand dawat to be a religious practice that entails an ethics of hierarchy in which one becomes virtuous by submitting to the authority of pious others. In dawat, Tablighis create a hierarchically structured world of pious sociality against the threat of egalitarian individualism in liberal and Islamist varieties.

Europolis, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2013, pp. 173-183

"The objective of this study is to offer the reader a short perspective on the ideology, political and militant forms of Indo-Pakistani Islam, in its classical period, as it is especially represented by al-Mawdūdī and the Tabligh movement. Being under British domination, South Asia experienced, as The Middle East did, an ample process of religious, identity and political resurrection, even since the 19th Century. The Muslim communities, being under the double pressure of Western influence and the overwhelming Hindu culture, seek to retrieve and especially reinterpret their traditional values, either piously, ethically and religiously, or politically and even in a militant fashion. Once with the establishment of the Pakistani state, in 1947, they will exist in a much more structured and institutionalized form, especially within the Islamic parties that will contribute more and more to the Islamization of the political, social, juridical and ethical fields of the new state. More so, the Tablighi Jama’at as well as al-Mawdūdī will largely overpass the Pakistani reference and will exert an influence over the whole Muslim community, until nowadays. Even if Tabligh essentially contributed to the revival of the Muslim identity values in a manner as faithful as possible to the Prophet’s initial model, becoming part of the Salafi transnational movements, at the same time, al-Mawdūdī and the Pakistani political Islam will serve as a model for the attempts of installing a Muslim order based on the construction of an Islamic state – it is the direction especially assumed by The Muslim Brotherhood."

Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, believe that Muslims have abandoned ‘religion’ (din) for ‘the world’ (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). The only way to draw Muslims to Islamic practice, they say, is through their own distinct, ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat), which is the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue because it is modelled on Prophetic example. In this article, I argue that dawat represents what Birgit Meyer has called a ‘sensational form’, an authorized set of practices and techniques for mediating a relationship to transcendental power and creating divine presence. But dawat is structured by an internal tension. On the one hand, dawat requires performing the Prophetic model in order to create a ‘direct’ relationship to God, but, on the other, creating a ‘connection’ between Muslims depends on incorporating new genres and mediums drawn from popular culture and mass media that stretch the boundaries of religion. This moral ambivalence, however, does not just lead to moral failure but instead is addressed through an emphasis on pious companionship (sohbat) and through submission to the authority of pious others. Moral ambivalence, therefore, becomes the generative ground for religious authority. The production and reproduction of religious authority in turn serves as the basis for incorporating novel forms of mediation in order to address diverse and changing social, political and economic contexts while retaining the aura of religious continuity.

DAVO - Annual Conference, 2003

The paper discusses preliminary findings from field research in India and Pakistan devoted to elicit views and information on the worldview of the Tablighi Jama'at. The project aimed at going beyond the hagiographic literature to reflect the internal culture of the movement. A central element of their sociology is their interpretation of the life of the founder generation of Islam. The paper will show how Tablighi interpretation of this ideal strives to strike a compromise between reformist concepts and current requirements. Their views gain increasing influence as a model for re-Islamising broad sections of Muslims in South Asia and beyond, as they branch out into all regions of the globe where Muslims live. Conference of German Middle Eastern Studies DAVO, Hamburg, 20 - 22 November, 2003, Panel "The Salafi Phenomenon"

POLITICS AND RELIGION JOURNAL, 2021

In the post-9/11 scenario, the rise of the Taliban and their coalition with Al-Qaeda have engendered new discourses about Islam and Pakistan. In this paper, I present a multi-sited ethnography of Bari Imam, a popular Sufi shrine in Pakistan while re-evaluating certain suppositions, claims and theories about popular Islam in the country. Have militarization, Shariatisation, and resurgence movements such as the Taliban been overzealously discussed and presented as the representative imageries of Islam? I also explore the Sufi dynamics of living Islam, which I will suggest continue to shape the lives and practices of the vast majority of Pakistani Muslims. The study suggests that general unfamiliarity of people outside the subcontinent with the Sufi attributes of living Islam, together with their lack of knowledge of the varieties of identification, observance and experience of Islam among Pakistanis, limit not only their understanding of the land of Pakistan, but also their perception...

Strategic Analysis, 1998

American Ethnologist, 1996

In Anthropological Quarterly, Special Issue: New Directions in the Anthropology of Religion and Gender: Faith and Emergent Masculinities

This article explores the ritual creation of a distinct form of pious masculinity among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani Tablighis practice a ritualized form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) that they claim cultivates the pious virtues that allow them to live ethically with kin, neighbors, and fellow citizens. I argue that dawat entails a reflexive ethical stance on male agency and represents an effort to manage the growing problem of male violence in Pakistani life. I conclude by arguing that constructions of “religious violence” so prevalent in the age of the Global War on Terror are underpinned by liberal–secular assumptions about ritual as an absence of critical thought and hierarchy as intrinsically violent. This liberal–secular framework not only rationalizes secular power, it also elides the ethical work that Tablighis are doing to address the violent afflictions of postcolonial modernity in Pakistan.

2015

This dissertation rethinks the common center-periphery perspective which frames the Middle East as the seat of authoritative religious reasoning vis-à-vis a marginal South Asian Islam. Drawing on 15 months of archival research and interviews conducted in Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, and the United Kingdom, I demonstrate how Shīʿī and Sunnī religious scholars (ʿulamā) in colonial India and Pakistan negotiate a complex web of closeness and distance that connects them to eminent Muslim jurists residing in the Arab lands and Iran. The project attempts to move beyond scholarly paradigms that investigate the transnational travel of ideas in terms of either resistance and rejection, on the one hand, or wholesale adoption, on the other. Rather, I show how local South Asian scholars occupy a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of modern and contemporary Islamic thought. Relying on unexplored sources in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, the dissertation examines these dynamics through the lenses of sectarianism, reform, and religious authority. It demonstrates how Indian Shīʿīs in the 1940s were haunted by the specter of Pakistan as a potentially exclusively Sunnī state. These substantial cleavages resurfaced in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Khomeini's model of the Rule of the Jurisprudent led sectarian Deobandīs to frame Shīʿīs as detrimental to their vision of creating a model Sunnī Islamic polity which was supposed to fulfil the promise of Pakistan. In the context of internal Shīʿī debates, I pay close attention to modernist challenges to Lucknow's Shīʿī clerical establishment in the late colonial period. Building on this conflict, I discuss how both reformist ʿulamā and their traditionalist, esoteric critics sought to appropriate the authority of leading Iranian and Iraqi Ayatollahs in order to emphasize their faithfulness to the Shīʿī mainstream. Both groups advanced their own, diverging vision of how to achieve a rapprochement with the Sunnī majority. The question of religious authority also plays a central role during the succession struggle after the death of a major “Source of Emulation” (marjaʿ al-taqlīd). I highlight the ability of Pakistani scholars to acquire religious clout during such periods of uncertainty. Similar agency is reflected in the unique ways in which Pakistan's Shīʿīs gradually made sense of the Iranian Revolution and how they filtered its transnational implications through the prism of their local religious needs. This study in its transnational scope speaks to historians of South Asia, the Middle East, and Islam, as well as to scholars working in the fields of Islamic thought, transnational history, Shīʿī studies, and religion more broadly.